There seems to be no effective way to slow Google’s growth in the search engine market, as the company is believed to have claimed more share of the global search engine market, according to data released by Net Applications and Hitwise. Bing may have slowed Google temporarily, but Microsoft may need much more Bing marketing and features to impact Google’s pace.
From a consumer’s perspective, there is really no reliable way in determining the actual market share of search engines these days as all major providers of estimates deliver vastly different numbers. However, all providers agree that Google has a dominant share and there is no sign that is going to change. StatCounter, Hitwise and NetApplications have already delivered their numbers for April 2010, with Statcounter estimating Google’s share at 90.37% (flat growth) and NetApplications at 86.30% (+0.55 points over March 2010.)
Comscore and Hitwise are a bit more conservative in their estimates – and are generally believed to be closer to reality, especially since Microsoft and Google like to quote those two companies as providers of market share numbers. We are still waiting for Comscore’s result, but Hitwise claims that Google has scored a huge gain in April 2010, growing its market share from 69.97% to 71.40% – and exceeding 70% market share again. Bing, on the other hand, saw a slight decline from 9.62% to 9.43% and remains in third place behind Yahoo, which slid once more: Yahoo dropped from 15.04% to 14.96%.
Search Engine Market Shares in April 2010
Hitwise said that Google Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Among the top three search engines, Google sent the most visits to key Internet categories – 20.25% to automotive, 33.88% to health, 17.28% to shopping and 27.91% to travel sites. Yahoo Search saw gains in the automotive and shopping categories. Bing saw double-digit growth among two categories – Health and Shopping – including a 105% increase in the Health category. However, Bing’s shares remains relatively low at 2.84% to automotive, 3.96% to health, 2.52% to shopping and 3.12% to travel sites.
